11 Things Chefs Hate to Cook

When a beautiful plate of food hits a diner’s table, it can be a stunning thing behold. The dish sits before you in all its aromatic, well-plated glory, conjuring up romantic notions of laser-focused cooks, sequestered several rooms away in a placid kitchen where they nurture stocks and coax the skins off of roasted beets.

But the scene behind closed doors is often quite different from what you’d imagine—more Gordon Ramsayan hell kitchen than Zen monastery. For most professionals, cooking is at once a pleasure, a test of patience, and, occasionally, a raging pain in the ass. If you’re a chef, you can sometimes pawn the worst jobs off on your cooks, and if you’re a cook, you might be able to dump your least favorite tasks onto an intern or a porter. But most of the time, you are just stuck with the drudgery.

How real does it get back there? Here, we take a look at 11 of the most painful, tedious, nasty, or just plain boring kitchen jobs—all unpleasant necessities on the road to the sublime. So before devouring that pan-roasted cod fillet with tomato-braised cardoons, take a moment to toast the back of the house, who did all of the shitty work so you didn’t have to.

Written by Scarlett Lindeman

When a beautiful plate of food hits a diner’s table, it can be a stunning thing behold. The dish sits before you in all its aromatic, well-plated glory, conjuring up romantic notions of laser-focused cooks, sequestered several rooms away in a placid kitchen where they nurture stocks and coax the skins off of roasted beets.
But the scene behind closed doors is often quite different from what you'd imagine—more Gordon Ramsayan hell kitchen than Zen monastery. For most professionals, cooking is at once a pleasure, a test of patience, and, occasionally, a raging pain in the ass. If you’re a chef, you can sometimes pawn the worst jobs off on your cooks, and if you’re a cook, you might be able to dump your least favorite tasks onto an intern or a porter. But most of the time, you are just stuck with the drudgery.
How real does it get back there? Here, we take a look at 11 of the most painful, tedious, nasty, or just plain boring kitchen jobs—all unpleasant necessities on the road to the sublime. So before devouring that pan-roasted cod fillet with tomato-braised cardoons, take a moment to toast the back of the house, who did all of the shitty work so you didn’t have to.
Written by Scarlett Lindeman

1. Duck Legs

Beautiful, fat-capped duck legs require a nice slow sear to turn them golden and crisp. Once the legs are in a hot pan, the fat starts to render, producing some serious schrapnel: Juices from the meat and melting fat hit the pools of molten grease collecting at the bottom of the pan, sending splashes of boiling duck fat cascading onto hands, wrists, and arms. The immediate third-degree burns swell into pink fluid-filled blisters. You can't get beautiful legs without a little pain. Fact.

2. Cardoons

A cardoon is a thistle-like plant from the Mediterranean that tastes like a poor-man’s artichoke. Cardoons can be delicious when cooked properly, but they are so shockingly bitter that they require blanching in multiple stages before they become edible. That means putting the stalks of cardoon in a pot, adding cold water, bringing it to a boil, pouring off the water, and repeating the process at least three times before they lose their acridity. Some especially nasty stalks can take five changes of water until they become palatable. Then, you have to go over every stalk with a paring knife, trimming away brown spots and fibrous segments. Only after this six-step process are they prepped and ready to cook with.

3. Soft-Shell Crab

There’s nothing more satisfying than chomping into a fried soft-shell crab. Chefs love the results of deep-frying this seasonal shellfish because it turns the entire carapace into a crunchy, crab-flavored chip. Actually doing it sucks, though. If you are stuck on the fry station during service, you dredge the crab in batter, slip it into hot oil, and have about 30 seconds to duck out of the way: The crab guts heat up inside of the shell and then burst out, sending little bombs of boiling oil in all directions. We should also mention that you have to kill the live crabs first by snipping off their little faces with sharp kitchen shears. Not a task for the faint of heart.

4. Fish that Require Deworming

Like most animals we eat, large fish such as cod and halibut are hosts to naturally occurring parasites—common worms that pose little threat to humans, but would be a horror to pull out of a pan-roasted filet in a fine restaurant. When breaking down large fish into manageable filets, it is the cook’s duty to hunt for these worms. A fairly easy task, but a disgusting one. The skinny, inch-long, pink-ish worms twist and squiggle their way through the filets and writhe under the pressure of a tweezer as you pull them from the flesh.

5. Roasted Red Peppers

Colorful sweet peppers may look benign, but turning them into luxuriously silky strips of sweet roasted pepper flesh takes leagues of patience. First, the peppers are charred over an open flame, set into a bowl, and covered to steam in their own hot juices. When cool enough to handle, the peppers’ papery skin needs to be peeled from the flesh. As with a bad sunburn, thin layers of skin can occasionally be stripped off in larger pieces, but they mostly break and tear into smaller bits, never coming off in one satisfying piece. Tiny flecks of skin stick to your hands, the table, and the other peppers. After each pepper is painstakingly peeled of its charred skin, it is broken open and the seeds, ribbing, and stem must also be removed by hand. Some amateurs peel peppers over bowls of water, using the liquid to rinse and facilitate the stripping as they go, but that washes off the essential smoky pepper juices. Real cooks take the long road.

6. Tripe

At most supermarkets, tripe—the stomach lining of grass-eating farm animals—is sold dressed and ready-to-use. But like anything that has contained half-digested matter on the road to shit, it should be given a once-over, one more time, before it's cooked. It needs to be rinsed thoroughly under cold water to remove any residual grit, then placed in a pot under cold water and brought to a boil. Once the water bubbles and plumes of barnyard-scented steam fills the kitchen, the water is dumped off. The pot should be refilled, brought to a simmer, and the tripe cooked for two to three hours. The tripe is then removed from the water and left to soak in fresh water in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, a cook will scrub the stomach lining with handfuls of salt, rinsing away any greyish mucosal lining, until the tripe is sparkling white and clean. Pain in the ass factor: Through the roof.

7. Nettles

If you’ve ever walked the forests of the East Coast, you’ve no doubt had a disagreeable encounter with stinging nettles. The knee-high green plants with triangular leaves have hollow stinging hairs that act like hypodermic needles, injecting histamine and other chemicals into any bare legs or swinging hands that come their way. In the kitchen, nettles are a rich food source that can be pounded into pestos and whizzed into sauces, but they need to be carefully prepared before you can eat them. A cook must double-bag their hands in prophylactic gloves, pluck the spiny leaves from the stems, and then blanch them to enervate the stingers. It’s nearly impossible not to brush up against some leaves during prep, resulting in a sharp, stinging sensation and constellations of tiny, itchy, red bumps. And during speedy walk-in searches, it’s common to plunge your hand into an unlabeled box looking for spinach, and pull out a big fistful of stinging nettles instead.

8. Skate

Breaking down whole skates—bottom-feeding, ray-like fish—is a maddening puzzle. With leathery, cartilaginous skin and razor sharp nodes along its fins and tail, the fish is as hard to get a grip on as a greased glass bottle, making it nearly impossible to sink a knife into. Once the wings are successfully sliced off, the skin needs to come off, as well. If you nick your hand on a spine or a sharp bone, you can expect it to turn into a painful, infected cut for the next two weeks. Skates carry loads of bacteria.

9. Charcuterie Sliced to Order

Unless your restaurant has sprung for a hand-cranked Berkel’s meat slicer, which costs more than most people's first cars, you’ll be using a clunky electric slicers to shave prosciutto, coppa, and other dried sausages into paper-thin wisps that melt delicately on the tongue. Unwieldy, heavy, and always in need of a good sharpening, the spinning circular blade on these machines is the last thing you want your hands close to during a busy dinner service. To use a meat slicer correctly, you place a metal clamp into whatever hunk of meat you are slicing. This clamp doesn’t always hold, and as you push a lamb carpaccio through the machine, nightmarish thoughts of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler spring to mind. Though actual injuries are rare, you’ll still have to spend at least 30 minutes disassembling the machine to clean it if you nick yourself: Flicking out shards of skin and meat that collect in the machine’s crevices; wiping off the fat that coats the little pins; and finally, scrubbing down, sanitizing, and reassembling before the job is finished.

10. Pig Skin

Chicharrones: crunchy, salty, delicious, and obnoxious to prepare. Pig skin is where the process starts. Flaps of rubbery raw skin need to be simmered slowly in a pot of water with some peppercorns and bay leaf, then carefully skimmed of any scum that rises to the surface. After about two to three hours of cooking, the skin will be tender enough to slice. The skins are removed from the pot and chilled in the refrigerator. Then the real work begins. The thick layer of gelatinous white fat needs to be scraped from the skin with the back of a knife. Slippery, almost impossible to grasp, the porcine flaps curl and slip under the knife’s pressure. Dragging the knife over the skin pulls up gunk and fat from the pores that needs to be wiped from the knife each time. Once all of the fat is painstakingly removed, which can take hours, the skin can be sliced into manageable portions and left to air-dry for a couple of days, before frying.

11. Fresh Thyme

Plucking enough individual leaves of thyme from their woody stems—when the leaves are smaller than a letter in this typeface, and you need a full cup of them—is like filling up a swimming pool with an eyedropper.

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